This sprint was mostly focused around testing and trying to build light shows with the tools inside of myMO. Although the DJ lights have been built for awhile now, this sprint was spent actually trying all the various lights and building up light shows using the menu system. The testing was to see the completeness and fix whatever issues that were encountered. The features either fixed or improved this sprint associated with DJ Light Shows were:
- Added ability to change dance floor from the DJ Control Panel
- Turn off the panning of lights after they had initially been set
- Change the drop down list in manual control of lights to have the “friendly name” of the light versus the DMX patch number
- If a previous version of a light cue (i.e. Laser) is running and a new laser light cue is selected. Unhighlight the light cue being replaced.
- Change Font Size of cues and light shows when typing in the new name to save
- When killing a light, set the light control values back to the default value for that light type
- Reset the manual control light sliders to match these default values
- Add option when saving a light cue to add it to the bottom of the existing light show
- Move Light Shows to AWS database versus stored locally
- Save Light Show in AWS in the same order as it was originally built
- Add House Lights and Fog to DMX Template
Here is a video of building a light show now with all the changes and fixes that were made this sprint:
The next major effort this sprint was running myMO and UE4 on ShadowPC. What we plan on using ShadowPC for is to make it easier in the future for Artists working on levels in myMO to be able to make changes and see the results of the changes in the game. Currently, if someone is building a map or just even making a minor change to an existing map, they have to take the unreal project, zip it up and send it to the development team who then will incorporate it into the game. This can take anywhere from hours to days to see the results of a minor change such as moving a tree, chair or any small changes.
ShadowPC is a powerful Windows PC you can access remotely. It is often used for people with lower end machines to run games requiring better hardware. It is a computer in the cloud that you log into and control from your desktop. It basically gives you a window on your local pc that is running the remote desktop on the cloud machine. This will allow us to have a common, shared build area for the game. It will work much like we did joint building projects in Sansar. A team member will go to discord and say that are getting into the ShadowPC account and login to the remote machine. They can then get in the UE editor and make changes to the current build. They can then also test it using the command line running of the game. Then at the end of a given sprint, the tech team will look at the current build status of the remote changes and do a build for Steam that will combine the changes made by the artists in this shared area as well as any programming changes that have been made by the dev team. This is the first step of our plan to make it easier for the team to collaborate and build out myMO.
Here is a video showing the testing of myMO on ShadowPC. Some tuning of the mouse sensitivity from the remote to cloud machine still needs to be tweaked, but, you can get an idea of how you could test using Shadow PC. We will make some more videos and formalize the approach and guidelines to this new approach in the upcoming sprints.
The last major set of changes was beginning to add new clubs to the build. We had a number of levels originally loaded as test levels by Aurrie. We are turning some of these into levels for the game as additional venues for DJ and music performances. The first one was taking Studio A which was an ESPN studio build done by the Unreal Team and turning it into the “Top of the Town” dance club. This was done by changing the lighting, swapping out textures, adding club meshes like DJ equipment & speakers, changing collisions, adding the blueprints, DJ lights and media screens, etc. It took a couple of days to renovate the Studio A into a dance club. We will be doing this to a number of maps/levels that we have to make them clubs for myMO. We still want to have custom “premium” clubs like the Rave Cave, Oasis Plaza & Club BlueMojo, but they are very labor intensive and we want to generate as may “turn key” other clubs to give potential players a number of options. Each of these new, turn key type clubs also have the scripting in them to allow people to move things around, add assets, change lights, etc so they can customize them in the game. The next few sprints will include a number of small dance clubs, a small outdoor park, an outer space dance club, a big concert arena and whatever else seems fun to do. Here is a video of the club done this sprint, the “Top of the Town” Dance Club:
The latest sprint build is available on Steam if you would like to visit it. Contact GranddadGotMojo if you don’t currently have access to it in Steam of need any help.
